Former Vice President Dick Cheney addressed a number of intimate topics in a new, lengthy interview with Playboy magazine.

According to the men’s magazine, journalist James Rosen interviewed Cheney for about six hours and repeatedly asked the former vice president about his openly gay daughter, his relationship with former Presidents George W. Bush and George H.W. Bush, his religion, his alcohol use in his younger days, and more.

“I was headed down a bad road after I had been kicked out of Yale. I had been arrested twice for DUI when I was 22-years-old,” Cheney recalled at one particularly candid point in the interview. “I was in jail in Rock Springs, Wyoming, overnight, on a DUI charge—second one in a year. And that was a wake-up call, in effect.”

Cheney would not detail the circumstances of his arrests, however.

“Uh,” he said, pausing. “I’ll just leave it at that. I didn’t hit anything. There were no accidents involved. I was drinking and driving, and there was no question I was guilty.”

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Rosen tried fishing for other stories associated with this time in Cheney’s life, but Cheney again demurred. He said he ultimately got his act together by getting married and no longer “hanging out in bars.”

“Why would you want to do that? No,” he told Rosen, pausing again. “The dean at one point wrote a letter to my dad saying that I had ‘fallen in with a group of very high-spirited young men.’ That was the way the dean described it. Yeah, I mean, we did a bunch of stupid stuff you do when you’re in college. I’ve never dwelled on it or written about it, and I don’t plan to.”

Cheney didn’t appear especially eager to talk about his openly gay daughter, either. According to Rosen, Cheney only devoted two sentences of his memoir, In My Time: A Personal and Political Memoir, to the moment Mary came out to him.

“I mean, it wasn’t something that was sort of there and nobody ever talked about,” Cheney said, describing himself as surprised by his daughter’s news. “But Mary was very direct about it. She just came out and said it — as I recall, we were in the airport in Denver. But it wasn’t anything I had anticipated or contemplated before that.”

Cheney, who announced his support for gay marriage after he left George W. Bush’s administration, said his former boss had “agonized” over the issue much more than himself. Bush backed a constitutional amendment blocking states from legalizing same-sex marriages.

“I always thought George W. Bush agonized over it more than I did, when he informed me he was going to support a constitutional amendment basically to ban gay marriage, same-sex marriage. I can remember having lunch with him at one point, and he was trying to explain to me what he was going to do. And of course he knew about Mary, and that’s partly what stimulated his concern. He was worried that somehow I would be offended by what he was doing,” Cheney recalled.

Cheney showed still more reticence when Rosen asked him to elaborate on his own faith.

“You’ve made clear at various points in your career that one of the few subjects you would prefer that your questioners not raise with you in-depth would be religion,” Rosen said.

You’ve made clear at various points in your career that one of the few subjects you would prefer that your questioners not raise with you in-depth would be religion

He only replied with a “Mm-hmm.”

“I just think it’s a private matter,” Cheney added after Rosen asked another question about his religion. “I was raised a Methodist. My family and my folks were very active in the church. Lynne and I were married in the Presbyterian church because that’s where she had gone as a youngster, and we, probably, if we go to any one particular church now more than any other, it’s the Episcopal church.”

On other topics, Cheney was much more loquacious. He repeatedly tore into President Barack Obama on a wide range of issues. And the former vice president jumped to defend the Bush administration’s controversial “enhanced interrogation program,” that many critics, including Obama, have labeled as torture.

“Where Guantánamo is concerned,” Rosen asked, “did you have any concerns that the way it was set up and operated created a situation in which an innocent man could languish in that place for, like, a decade?”

Cheney said he had no reservations or concerns about this.

“Frankly, I didn’t worry a lot about that. I wanted to make certain that we had a place where we could, in fact, take guilty individuals,” he said. “I didn’t sit around wringing my hands at night worrying about an innocent terrorist down in Guantánamo. I mean, these were people we captured on the battlefield or caught in the act, and they were well cared for, treated far better than they would have been in their own country. … They’re probably better than some of the municipal jails here in the United States.”

Of all the shocks and revelations in the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report on CIA torture, one seems very strange and unlikely: that the agency misinformed the White House and didn’t even brief President George W. Bush about its controversial program until April 2006.

The question of the claim’s truth or implausibility is not trivial or academic; it goes well beyond score-settling, Bush-bashing, or scapegoating. Rather, it speaks to an issue that’s central in the report in the long history of CIA scandals, and in debates over whether and how policy should be changed: Did the torture begin, and did it get out of hand, because the CIA’s detention and interrogation program devolved into a rogue operation? Or were the program’s managers actually doing the president’s dirty business?

If the former was the case, then heads should roll, grand juries should be assembled, organizational charts should be reshuffled, and mechanisms of oversight should be tightened. If the latter was the case, well, that’s what elections are for. “Enhanced-interrogation techniques” were formally ended by President Barack Obama after the 2008 election, and perhaps future presidents will read the report with an eye toward avoiding the mistakes of the past.

But which was it? Were the CIA’s directorate of operations and its counterterrorism center freelancing after the Sept. 11 attacks, or were they exchanging winks and nods with the commander-in-chief?

The annals of history suggest the latter, and in a few passages, so does the report. A big lesson of the Church Committee — Sen. Frank Church’s mid-1970s probe into black-bag jobs, assassination plots, coup attempts, and other acts of CIA malfeasance since the agency’s origins — is that, in nearly every instance, there was no “rogue elephant” at Langley. Rather, the presidents in office at the time knew what was going on, at least in broad, strategic terms — and their CIA henchmen knew to give the leader of the free world a wide berth of “plausible deniability” in case they got caught.

As the Church reports and books such as Tim Weiner’s “Legacy of Ashes” clearly show, President Dwight Eisenhower knew about and approved the CIA’s plot to overthrow Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddeq. President John F. Kennedy knew about, and approved, the plots to murder Cuba’s Fidel Castro; in fact, his brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, formed a top-secret “special group” in the White House to oversee the operation. President Lyndon B. Johnson (who, after he left office, told a reporter that Kennedy had been running “a damn Murder Inc. in the Caribbean”) carried on the enterprise elsewhere in Latin America.

It seems odd, then, that the officials running the CIA interrogation program kept things secret from the highest elected officials and thus, as the report puts it, “impeded effective White House oversight and decision-making.” First, the history of these sorts of programs suggests they were carrying out White House decisions. Second, President Bush and especially Vice President Dick Cheney supported the program, and they still emphatically defend it. Mr. Bush wrote in his memoirs that he approved it.

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The committee’s own account contains anomalies on this question. For instance, the report cites an internal CIA email noting that “the [White House] is extremely concerned [that Secretary of State Colin] Powell would blow his stack if he were to be briefed on what’s been going on.” That was written in July 2003, nearly three years before Mr. Bush was supposedly first briefed on the program, yet someone in the White House not only knew about it, but knew enough to know that certain Cabinet secretaries — in this case, a former Army general and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff well-versed in the Geneva Conventions and official manuals on interrogation — might object.

The report also cites a briefing by a CIA station chief to a government official in a foreign country where the agency had set up a secret detention centre. “The presentation,” the report says of the briefing, “also noted that the president of the United States had directed that he not be informed of the location of the CIA detention facilities to ensure he would not accidentally disclose the information.”

No date is provided for when this briefing took place (or perhaps it’s been redacted in the footnote), but the context suggests 2003 or 2004. Again, this is two or three years before Mr. Bush was supposedly first briefed on the program — yet, he already knew that the CIA did have secret foreign detention centers for interrogating suspected terrorists in ways that might be illegal if done stateside.

Brendan Hoffman/Getty ImagesDick Cheney.

A key point here is that Bush “had directed” the CIA not to tell him the locations of these centres. This fits the classic pattern of “plausible deniability”: The president is told about the drift and outlines of the black program (be it an assassination, a coup, bribery, torture, or whatever), but he doesn’t want to be told too much. He doesn’t want his fingerprints on any directive, so that, in case things go awry, he can blame Langley — and part of Langley’s job is to take the blame.

With this in mind, let’s take a close look at the committee’s claim that Mr. Bush wasn’t briefed on the program until it had nearly run its course: “According to CIA records,” the report states, “no CIA officer, up to and including CIA Directors George Tenet and Porter Goss, briefed the president on the specific CIA enhanced interrogation techniques before April 2006.”

I’ve italicized two words in this passage, for emphasis. The second word is key: Mr. Bush wasn’t briefed on the “specific” techniques till 2006. Under the well-known rules of plausible deniability, he would not have wanted to know too much about these specifics. As indicated in the station chief’s presentation, it’s not that the CIA didn’t tell the president certain details; it’s that the president didn’t want the CIA to tell him.

But the other use of italics — “According to CIA records” — is more significant than it may seem at first glance. The Senate committee was denied access to White House records. Its staff examined only CIA records, and if the principles of plausible deniability were in force, the CIA probably would not have had records of earlier briefings, if there were any. (And we know there must have been some, because Mr. Bush knew, much earlier, about the fact that secret foreign detention centres existed.) It’s worth noting, according to the report, that the April 2006 briefing took place only after Mr. Bush’s national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, demanded that he be briefed. At that point, deniability would no longer be plausible; word of the program had spread beyond the Oval Office and into the West Wing.

The report also notes that Colin Powell and Donald Rumsfeld, the secretaries of state and defense, were finally briefed on these unpleasant specifics on Sept. 16, 2003. Are the report’s authors suggesting that the CIA informed key members of the president’s Cabinet 2 1/2 years before it told the President himself? If nothing else, Mr. Cheney, who had his own back-channel contacts at Langley, would have known what was going on. It is now well known that, on many national security issues, Mr. Cheney was running the show during Mr. Bush’s first term. But there’s no evidence, on any issue, that Mr. Cheney left Mr. Bush out of the loop.

One sign of the dysfunctional decision-making in Mr. Bush’s first term is that, quite often, the National Security Council would decide on some policy, and then Mr. Cheney would have a one-on-one chat with Mr. Bush in the Oval Office, and the policy would be crucially modified or reversed. Unless Mr. Bush kept a tape recorder running, like Kennedy and Johnson, we may never know the full reasons for the invasion of Iraq, the termination of talks with North Korea, or many other actions Mr. Bush took that affected the fate of the nation and the lives of millions of people worldwide.

None of this should imply that the CIA was blameless, or merely a White House tool, in its torture of detainees. The report lays out compelling evidence that the agency’s directorate of operations and its counterterrorism center lied to its own lawyers and inspector general; that they kept congressional intelligence committees in the dark; and that they contracted out many interrogations (at enormous expense) to inexperienced psychologists of a sadistic bent, ignoring dissent not only from FBI agents (who often eked out more useful information with gentler techniques) but also from the CIA’s own chief of interrogations, who wrote a memo, back on Jan. 21, 2003, expressing “serious reservations” about their techniques, adding, “This is a train wreck waiting to happen, and I intend to get the hell off the train before it happens.”

The committee offers no recommendations on how to make things better (at least not in the 524-page executive summary partly declassified and released this week), but there are clear lessons for future presidents to absorb. Not least is the dark, slippery slide of “plausible deniability.” It must be tempting for a president to nod his head, say, “Make it so,” and then sit back, knowing that, whatever “it” is will probably happen. That’s part of what the CIA does and always has done. But as this report, like many similar reports in the past 40 years, clearly show, it’s a perilous gamble; the people who carry out such orders take them literally and to the maximum limit. Presidents should stop doing this, even if it means accepting accountability for things they’ve long been enabled to avoid.

Slate

Fred Kaplan is the author of “The Insurgents: David Petraeus and the Plot to Change the American Way of War” and “1959: The Year Everything Changed.”

The CIA and several of its past leaders are stepping up a campaign to discredit a five-year Senate investigation into the CIA’s harrowing interrogation practices after 9/11, concerned that the historical record may define them as torturers instead of patriots and expose them to legal action around the world.

“We asked the agency to go take steps and put in place programs that were designed to catch the bastards who killed 3,000 of us on 9-11 and make sure it didn’t happen again, and that’s exactly what they did, and they deserve a lot of credit,” he said, “not the condemnation they are receiving from the Senate Democrats. ”

The Senate intelligence committee’s report doesn’t urge prosecution for wrongdoing, and the Justice Department has no interest in reopening a criminal probe. But the threat to former interrogators and their superiors was underlined as a UN special investigator demanded those responsible for “systematic crimes” be brought to justice, and human rights groups pushed for the arrest of key CIA and Bush administration figures if they travel overseas.

Former Vice-President Dick Cheney pushed backWednesday, saying in a Fox News interview that the Senate report “is full of crap” and said it was a “flat-out lie” to say President George W. Bush didn’t know about details about the interrogation program.

“He knew certainly the techniques,” Cheney said on Fox News. “We did discuss the techniques. There was no effort on our part to keep him from that.”

In no uncertain terms, Cheney said the CIA’s approach to interrogating terror suspects was necessary after the 9/11 attacks, and the people who carried them out were doing their duty.

“How nice do you want to be to the murderers of 3,000 Americans?” he asked.

Current and former CIA officials also pushed back, determined to paint the Senate report as a political stunt by Senate Democrats tarnishing a program that saved American lives. It is a “one-sided study marred by errors of fact and interpretation — essentially a poorly done and partisan attack on the agency that has done the most to protect America,” former CIA directors George Tenet, Porter Goss and Michael Hayden wrote in a Wall Street Journal opinion piece.

Hayden was singled out by Senate investigators for what they said was a string of misleading or outright false statements he gave in 2007 about the importance of the CIA’s brutal treatment of detainees in thwarting terrorist attacks. He described the focus on him as “ironic on so many levels” as any wrongdoing predated his arrival at the CIA. “They were far too interested in yelling at me,” Hayden said in an email to The Associated Press.

The intelligence committee’s 500-page release concluded that the CIA inflicted suffering on al-Qaida prisoners beyond its legal authority and that none of the agency’s “enhanced interrogations” provided critical, life-saving intelligence. It cited the CIA’s own records, documenting in detail how waterboarding and lesser-known techniques such as “rectal feeding” were actually employed.

The CIA is now in the uncomfortable position of defending itself publicly, given its basic mission to protect the country secretly. Its 136-page rebuttal suggests Senate Democrats searched through millions of documents to pull out only the evidence backing up predetermined conclusions. “That’s like doing a crossword puzzle on Tuesday with Wednesday’s answer’s key,” the CIA said in an emailed statement.

Challenging one of the report’s most explosive arguments — that harsh interrogation techniques didn’t lead to Osama bin Laden — the CIA pointed to questioning of Ammar al-Baluchi, who revealed how an al-Qaida operative relayed messages to and from bin Laden after he departed Afghanistan. Before then, the CIA said, it only knew that courier Abu Ahmad al-Kuwaiti interacted with bin Laden in 2001 when the al-Qaida leader was accessible to many of his followers. Al-Kuwaiti eventually led the U.S. to bin Laden’s compound in Pakistan.

Poring over the same body of evidence as the investigators, the CIA insisted most of the 20 case studies cited in the Senate report actually illustrated how enhanced interrogations helped disrupt plots, capture terrorists and prevent another 9-11-type attack. The agency said it obtained legal authority for its actions from the Justice Department and White House, and made “good faith” efforts to keep congressional leaders informed.

Former CIA officials responsible for the program echoed these points in interviews.

John McLaughlin, then deputy CIA director, said waterboarding and other tactics transformed Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed into a U.S. “consultant” on al-Qaida.

Tenet, the director on Sept. 11, 2001, said the interrogation program “saved thousands of Americans lives” while the country faced a “ticking time bomb every day.”

And former top CIA officials published a website — http://ciasavedlives.com — pointing out decade-old statements from Sens. Dianne Feinstein and Jay Rockefeller in apparent support of agency efforts. The two Democrats spearheaded the Senate investigation.

The Intelligence Committee’s Republicans issued their own 167-page “minority” report and said the Democratic analysis was flawed, dishonest and, at $40 million, a waste of taxpayer money. Feinstein’s office said Wednesday most of the cost was incurred by the CIA in trying to hide its record.

If the sides agreed on one thing, it was the CIA suffered from significant mismanagement problems early on. The agency and its Republican supporters said those failings were corrected.

“We have learned from these mistakes,” current CIA Director John Brennan said.

How nice do you want to be to the murderers of 3,000 Americans?

President Bush approved the program through a covert finding in 2002 but wasn’t briefed by the CIA on the details until 2006, the Senate report said.

Obama banned harsh interrogation tactics upon taking office, calling the treatment “torture.” But he has shown little interest in holding accountable anyone involved, a sore point among human rights groups and his supporters on the left.

Lawyers representing former CIA detainees have introduced cases in Europe and Canada, though to little success thus far. Undeclared prisons existed in Poland, Romania and Lithuania, among countries.

Twenty-six Americans, mostly CIA agents, were convicted in absentia in Italy of kidnapping a Muslim cleric in Milan in 2003, limiting their ability to travel for fear of extradition. The former CIA base chief in Italy was briefly detained in Panama last year before being returned to the U.S.

]]>http://news.nationalpost.com//torture-report-full-of-crap-says-dick-cheney-as-cia-officials-step-up-campaign-to-discredit-senate-investigation/feed/8stdDick Cheney speaks to the speaking at the International Economic Forum of the Americas in Toronto.waterboardU.S. Senate report says America’s sorry record of torture wasn’t even effectivehttp://news.nationalpost.com/full-comment/u-s-senate-report-says-americas-sorry-record-of-torture-wasnt-even-effective
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Full Comment’s Araminta Wordsworth brings you a daily round-up of quality punditry from across the globe. Today: Torture is abhorrent on so many levels, it is hard to know where to start — try illegal, unspeakable and ineffective.

That’s the conclusion of the Senate’s 480-page summary of its much longer report on America’s licensed torturers, members of the shadowy intelligence community who lied, obfuscated and denied. So did their bosses, from president George W. Bush on down.

They all claimed information obtained as a result of what they called enhanced interrogation techniques, including waterboarding, made the world a safer place.

As Mark Fallon, a former special agent in charge of the criminal investigation task force with investigators and intelligence personnel at Guantanamo Bay, Afghanistan and Iraq, writes on Politico, America has besmirched its good name to no real purpose: Torture doesn’t work.

I was privy to the information provided by Khalid Sheik Mohammed. I was aware of no valuable information that came from waterboarding. And the Senate Intelligence Committee— which had access to all CIA documents related to the “enhanced interrogation” program — has concluded that abusive techniques didn’t help the hunt for [Osama] Bin Laden. [Dick] Cheney’s claim that the frequent waterboarding of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed “produced phenomenal results for us” is simply false.

The self-defeating stupidity of torture might come as news to Americans who’ve heard again and again from Cheney and other political leaders that torture “worked.” Professional interrogators, however, couldn’t be less surprised.

America’s torturers also claimed what they were doing was not torture. In this they relied on an opinion obtained from the U.S. Justice Department that essentially ruled it wasn’t torture if those doing the torture didn’t see it as such.

The Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel found that the methods wouldn’t breach the law because those applying them didn’t have the specific intent of inflicting severe pain or suffering.[my italics]

The Senate report, however, concluded that the Justice Department’s legal analyses were based on flawed information provided by the CIA, which prevented a proper evaluation of the program’s legality: “The CIA repeatedly provided inaccurate information to the Department of Justice, impeding a proper legal analysis of the CIA’s Detention and Interrogation Program.”

I abruptly felt a slow cascade of water going up my nose … I held my breath for a while and then had to exhale and — as you might expect — inhale in turn. [That] brought the damp cloths tight against my nostrils, as if a huge, wet paw had been suddenly and annihilatingly clamped over my face. Unable to determine whether I was breathing in or out, flooded more with sheer panic than with water, I triggered the pre-arranged signal and felt the unbelievable relief of being pulled upright.

The official lie about this treatment … is that it “simulates” the feeling of drowning. This is not the case. You feel that you are drowning because you are drowning—or, rather, being drowned.

Anthony D. Romero of the American Civil Liberties suggests Barack Obama take a leaf out of the book of Abraham Lincoln, who pardoned Confederate soldiers after the Civil War.

Mr. Obama could pardon George J. Tenet for authorizing torture at the C.I.A.’s black sites overseas, Donald H, Rumsfeld for authorizing the use of torture at the Guantánamo Bay prison, David S. Addington, John C. Yoo and Jay S. Bybee for crafting the legal cover for torture, and George W. Bush and Dick Cheney for overseeing it all …

The spectacle of the president’s granting pardons to torturers still makes my stomach turn. But doing so may be the only way to ensure that the American government never tortures again. Pardons would make clear that crimes were committed; that the individuals who authorized and committed torture were indeed criminals; and that future architects and perpetrators of torture should beware. Prosecutions would be preferable, but pardons may be the only viable and lasting way to close the Pandora’s box of torture once and for all.

Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly on Wednesday night grilled former U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney, who published an op-ed with his daughter Wednesday blasting President Barack Obama over his handling of the crisis in Iraq.

Dick and Liz Cheney wrote in their Wall Street Journal op-ed that “rarely” has a president ever been “so wrong about so much at the expense of so many.”

On her show, “The Kelly File,” Kelly read that quote to Cheney and said, “But time and time again, history has proven that you got it wrong as well, sir.”

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Kelly proceeded to fire off a list of Cheney’s claims and pronouncements from his time at the White House that ended up being disputed or outright wrong — that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, that U.S. soldiers would be “greeted as liberators,” that the Iraqi insurgency was “in its last throes” in 2005, and that extremists would have to “rethink their strategy of jihad” after the U.S. intervention.

“Now with almost one trillion dollars spent there with 4,500 American lives lost there, what do you say to those who say you were so wrong about so much at the expense of so many?” Kelly said.

David J. Phillip/Associated PressFormer Vice President Dick Cheney participates in the dedication of the George W. Bush Presidential Centre in Dallas in 2013.

Cheney, who seemed taken aback, defended the Bush administration’s actions in Iraq.

“Well, I just fundamentally disagree, Reagan — uh, Megyn,” Cheney said. “You’ve got to go back and look at the track record. We inherited a situation where there was no doubt in anybody’s mind about the extent of Saddam’s involvement in weapons of mass destruction. We had a situation where, after 9/11, we were concerned about a follow-up attack. It would involve not just airline tickets and box cutters as the weapons, but rather something far deadlier, perhaps even a nuclear weapon.”

Matt Young/National PostLiz Cheney, Dick Cheney's daughter.

The Cheneys’ op-ed sparked controversy and a snippy dismissal from the current White House on Wednesday, due to Dick Cheney’s role in the Iraq war. As Kelly said in introducing him, he was the “the man who helped lead us into Iraq in the first place.”

Kelly opened her segment by pointing to a particularly harsh response to Cheney’s op-ed from The Washington Post’s Paul Waldman, who wrote there has not been a “single person” who has been “more wrong and shamelessly dishonest” on Iraq than Cheney.

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In her withdrawal statement, Cheney did not mention those controversies.

“Serious health issues have recently arisen in our family, and under the circumstances, I have decided to discontinue my campaign. My children and their futures were the motivation for our campaign and they will always be my overriding priority,” Cheney said. She did not specify those health issues.

She added: “As a mother and a patriot, I know that the work of defending freedom and protecting liberty must continue for each generation. Though this campaign stops today, my commitment to keep fighting with you and your families for the fundamental values that have made this nation and Wyoming great will never stop.”

Cheney moved her family from Virginia to Wyoming to run for the seat. Her effort to replace Enzi, a Senate veteran, angered and upset many Republicans and drew virtually no support from Senate Republicans, who rushed to back Enzi.

Sen. Jerry Moran, R-Kan., chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, swiftly expressed support for Enzi moments after Cheney announced last year.

When she announced her campaign, Cheney said it was time for Republicans in Congress to stop “cutting deals” with Democrats.

“We’ve got to stand and fight, and we have to defend what we believe in. We have to not be afraid of being called obstructionists,” Cheney said.

“In my view, obstructing President Obama’s policies and his agenda isn’t actually obstruction; it’s patriotism,” Cheney said. “I think we have to stop what he’s doing, and then as conservatives, we’ve got to say, ’Here’s what we believe,’ and, ’Here’s the path forward,’ and that’s what I intend to lay out in this campaign.”

In November, Cheney said she opposed gay marriage, sparking a public feud with her sister, Mary, who is a lesbian and married.

Cheney’s decision was first reported by CNN, The New York Times and Politico.

]]>http://news.nationalpost.com//liz-cheney-abandons-wyoming-senate-race-after-republican-grumbling-public-rift-with-sister-over-gay-marriage/feed/3stdLiz Cheney, daughter of former Vice-President Dick Cheney, shown in July 2013, said Monday she is abandoning her effort to unseat Republican incumbent Sen. Mike Enzi.Liz Cheney throws gay sister under the bus in a bid to win in Wyominghttp://news.nationalpost.com/full-comment/liz-cheney-throws-gay-sister-under-the-bus-in-a-bid-to-win-in-wyoming
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Full Comment’s Araminta Wordsworth brings you a daily round-up of quality punditry from across the globe. Today: American Thanksgiving is next week, but it won’t be a time of unity for the Cheneys.

The former vice-president’s family is being torn apart by a fight between his daughters Liz and Mary.

In an interview on Fox News Sunday, Liz, the wannabe Republican Senate candidate in Wyoming, defended marriage as only the union of a man and a woman.

This came as a surprise to Mary, a lesbian who lives with her wife Heather Poe, and two daughters. Liz attended the couple’s wedding last year and had shown every sign up till now of tolerating — if not openly supporting — gay marriage.

But that was in private. The two sisters kept their differences to themselves although they have reportedly not spoken since the summer. But after Liz’s statement, the gloves are off. Ms. Poe responded in a dignified posting on her Facebook page,

I was watching my sister-in-law on Fox News Sunday (yes Liz, in 15 states and the District of Columbia you are my sister-in-law) and was very disappointed to hear her say ‘I do believe in the traditional definition of marriage’….

Liz has been a guest in our home, has spent time and shared holidays with our children, and when Mary and I got married in 2012 — she didn’t hesitate to tell us how happy she was for us.

To have her now say she doesn’t support our right to marry is offensive to say the least.

To political commentators, Liz Cheney’s statement smacks of arrant opportunism.

She needs to reassure conservative Wyoming, where she’s seen as a carpetbagger from Washington. And to have any chance against Mike Enzi, the popular three-time incumbent and party stalwart, she must tilt ever further to the right. This is despite the fact her father Dick Cheney — a man no one could accuse of liberalism — has been a long-time supporter of the right of gays to wed.

The Atlantic’sGarance Franke-Ruta believes Liz’s actions have made her the black sheep of the Cheney family.

With her self-serving public remarks against gay marriage on Fox News Sunday, Liz Cheney has now made herself into the black sheep of the Cheney family. Not even Cheney père takes so extreme a position against the emotional well-being of a member of his hearth.

Liz Cheney is running as a challenger in the Republican primary in Wyoming against incumbent Sen. Mike Enzi. She’s so far down in the polls a loss seems foreordained. But Republican voters in the state of Wyoming are still iffy on the question of same-sex marriage — the majority of them oppose it — and Liz Cheney has since the summer been saying she’s in sync with that, too.

At The Washington Post, Aaron Blake notes the Cheney family implosion comes as the party is slowly changing its views of gay marriage.

The public eruption of the internal Cheney family drama gave airing to the broader struggle within the GOP about how to handle gay marriage at a time when such unions are rapidly gaining legal status and widespread public acceptance.

Many prominent voices within the party – including top strategists and political donors – now back the effort to legalize gay marriage. Public surveys show GOP attitudes about same-sex marriage are changing, albeit at a much slower pace than the overall population. In a March Washington Post-ABC poll, 34% of Republicans said they believe it should be legal for gay and lesbian couples to marry, up from 22% in 2009.

Brent Budowsky at The Hill believes the latest fiasco may be the last straw for Liz Cheney’s flagging campaign.

Triangulating against the marriage of her own sister for political purposes hits rock bottom … Politically, I think Cheney looks like a darn fool and crass politician by criticizing the marriage of her sister. With attitudes like hers, after Cheney loses her Wyoming campaign, perhaps she can find a more intolerant state to run in next time.

Even better, there are some foreign countries that value intolerance; and the next time one of them is looking for a president, prime minister, emperor, empress, king or politburo director, perhaps Liz Cheney can airlift herself into that country and apply for the position.

Chanelling The Godfather’s Michael Corleone, CNN’s Ruben Navarrette accuses Liz Cheney of breaking the first commandment of family loyalty.

You don’t get to choose your family. Still, family members might choose a destructive lifestyle that puts them at odds with loved ones. They make others uncomfortable, and hurt those who love them. These people are often thinking only of themselves, and they haven’t considered the consequences of their behaviour.

Liz Cheney is one of these people. And the destructive lifestyle she has chosen is that of a politician.

[But] she should tread lightly on this subject. Why? Because blood is thicker than votes. And because Michael Corleone was right, and — even in the rough and tumble of politics — you “don’t ever take sides with anyone against the family.”

In accordance with The New York Times licensing agreement, this article has been removed. You can still view it at nytimes.com.

]]>http://news.nationalpost.com//youre-on-the-wrong-side-of-history-fight-erupts-between-mary-cheney-and-senate-candidate-sister-liz-over-same-sex-marriage/feed/2stdElizabeth (L) and Mary Cheney, daughters of Vice President Dick Cheney attend the Republican National Convention at Madison Square Garden in New York City in this September 1,2004 file photo. The daughters of former vice president Cheney are quarreling publicly over comments Liz Cheney, running for office in Wyoming, madeRobyn Urback: What if Canada actually did arrest Dick Cheney?http://news.nationalpost.com/full-comment/robyn-urback-what-if-canada-actually-did-arrest-dick-cheney
http://news.nationalpost.com/full-comment/robyn-urback-what-if-canada-actually-did-arrest-dick-cheney#commentsFri, 01 Nov 2013 16:22:33 +0000http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/?p=134428

As former U.S. vice president Dick Cheney spoke in Toronto on Thursday, a group of protesters outside the luncheon appealed to cops to “do [their] duty.” The protesters, along with international activist group Lawyers Against the War, wanted to see Toronto police arrest Cheney as “a person suspected on reasonable grounds of authorizing, counseling, aiding, abetting and failing to prevent torture.”

In a letter to Toronto Police Chief Bill Blair and Ontario Attorney-General John Gerretsen, Lawyers Against the War contended that Cheney can be arrested under the Criminal Code of Canada, and also by Canada’s obligation under its War Crimes Program, which denies “persons involved in war crimes” a safe haven in Canada. The call for Cheney’s arrest stems from his involvement in torture tactics used by the CIA and by authorities at Guantanamo Bay prison, for which Cheney has admitted to playing a central role.

It’s not altogether surprising that a group of justice-seekers would call for the arrest of a prominent foreign figure upon his or her arrival in Canada — it happens all the time when former U.S. President George W. Bush drops in to talk to university students or sign books. But consideration on the part of these activists rarely goes beyond the point of arrest. What would happen after if Canada actually did arrest Dick Cheney? Let’s do a little hypothesizing:

Well, to be clear, no American president — not even Barack Obama — would stand idly by as foreign authorities arrest and detain a former U.S. vice president. After making a quick call to confirm that, yes, the prison in Guantanamo Bay is still operating and realizing that he, too, could be detained in Canada for his complicity in torture (uh, and “drone” thing isn’t that great, either), Obama realizes that he must indeed take strong action! But maybe he’ll double check with Congress first — just to be sure.

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Cheney, meanwhile, is carted off for detention — possibly at the swanky new South Detention Centre in Toronto, not the Don Jail (he is a former U.S. vice president, after all). There, he’ll be treated to a roast beef sandwich, and maybe also, based on recent trends, meet a guy named “Lisi,” who keeps asking him with a wink if he needs any dry cleaning. Cheney quickly realizes that he must get out of there.

At his convention in Calgary, Stephen Harper is quickly alerted to the news, and he makes a public statement declaring that he had no idea that authorities were planning on arresting the former vice president. He is thankful for the distraction from the ongoing Senate scandal but worries that the situation may become an international incident. So Harper goes on talk radio with John Tory to try to mitigate the reaction.

It doesn’t work. Obama gets on the phone with Ottawa and says that Canada has 12 hours to ensure Cheney’s release, “or else.” Obama doesn’t specify what they “or else” means, but his office later clarifies that the President is prepared to enforce emergency economic sanctions and possibly take military action. “Yes, that’s what I meant,” Obama confirms on Twitter.

Celine Dion. Really? Celine Dion?<strong><em><a href="http://nationalpostcom.files.wordpress.com/2013/12/50canadians.jpg"><img class="alignright size-medium wp-image-134981" alt="50 Canadians Who Changed the World by Ken McGoogan" src="http://nationalpostcom.files.wordpress.com/2013/12/50canadians.jpg?w=300&quot; width="300" height="450" /></a>50 Canadians Who Changed the World</em></strong>
<strong> By Ken McGoogan</strong>
<strong> HarperCollins Canada</strong>
<strong> 329 pp; $29.99</strong>
Any writer professing to identify the <em>50 Canadians Who Changed the World</em> is spoiling for an argument, so I’ll assume Ken McGoogan won’t mind if I cut to the chase and get right down to quibbling with the list of Canadians who did — and didn’t — make his roster. McGoogan, author of the popular <em>How the Scots Invented Canada</em>, was bound by three, self-imposed criteria in compiling thumbnail biographies of influential Canadians: His subjects had to be born in the 20th century; their achievements had to have global reach; and they had to come from a range of fields, including politics, science, sports and the arts. Fair enough, I suppose, even if it means excluding former prime minister Lester B. Pearson, whose accomplishment as the only Canadian to win the Nobel Peace Prize is overlooked for no other reason than his having been born three years too soon.
Actually, the list of complaints is fairly short, if strongly coloured by my own biases and preferences. For starters: Celine Dion. Really? Celine Dion?
Sure, the Quebec chanteuse has sold more than 200 million records by McGoogan’s count, but even he doesn’t make a convincing case for her larger influence. You could more easily argue for Alanis Morissette, who has also sold millions and was responsible for blazing a trail for other success stories. Avril Lavigne, for one, counts Morissette as a model. Who would say the same of Dion? You might also wonder how Dion makes the cut when Neil Young and Gordon Lightfoot don’t. That said, you’ll find no complaints with the inclusion of Leonard Cohen and Joni Mitchell, as well as musical icons from outside pop, namely classical pianist Glenn Gould and jazz counterpart Oscar Peterson.
[related_links /]
McGoogan’s nomination of James Cameron, director of Hollywood blockbusters <em>The Terminator</em>, <em>Titanic</em> and <em>Avatar</em>, is also based on sales, but the argument is bolstered by Cameron’s bona fides as a cinematic innovator. Still, Cameron is the only filmmaker on the list, which will leave some wondering about the omission of Norman Jewison, David Cronenberg and, if I had a vote, Donald Brittain. Elsewhere in the arts, McGoogan has not managed to find a place on Team Canada for literary critic Northrop Frye, photographer Yousuf Karsh, novelist Mordecai Richler and stage wizard Robert Lepage. Among potential errors of commission, urban thinker Jane Jacobs makes it on the list, even though her landmark achievement,<em> The Death and Life of Great American Cities</em>, predated her adoption of this country.
None of which is to suggest that McGoogan’s intentions or approach are remotely frivolous. Blessedly, there is no mention of Pamela Anderson, who, thanks to the collective lack of wisdom among those casting votes, finished ahead of both Marshall McLuhan and Glenn Gould during CBC-TV’s ranking of greatest Canadians in 2004. Indeed, the chief value of McGoogan’s book is that in addition to a lineup of predictable suspects (Tommy Douglas, Pierre Trudeau, Margaret Atwood, Alice Munro and so on) a welcome opportunity is taken to applaud the efforts of many Canadians who don’t enjoy household name status. These include Inuit activist Sheila Watt-Cloutier, digital guru Don Tapscott, anthropologist Wade Davis, neuroscientist Brenda Milner and astrophysicist Sara Seager.
The biographies, each running roughly three to four pages, are often enlivened by engaging anecdotes. Readers learn how actor Michael J. Fox discovered he had Parkinson’s, are treated to a chance encounter between Leonard Cohen and a Calgary waitress and are provided with an amusing yarn about Mohawk First Nations actor Jay Silverheels, best known for his portrayal of the Lone Ranger’s faithful sidekick Tonto. Mostly, these aren’t warts-and-all sketches. Although McGoogan shrugs off the charges of fabrication that have dogged author Farley Mowat, he gets points for not ignoring the controversy altogether.
As for quibbles of another sort, there are times when McGoogan would have benefited from a more vigilant editor. Jane Jacobs is described as having started her career working for a newspaper as an “unpaid gopher.” One moment Frank Gehry is “no stranger to controversy.” Several paragraphs later, the same architect is “no stranger to tall buildings.” These familiarities should stand him in good stead as he proceeds to build a controversial, skyscraping condo in downtown Toronto.
McGoogan, aware of the necessary curatorial omissions involved in such a project, more than hints at the likelihood of a sequel. One person he vows to get around to next time is musician Bryan Adams. Surely not to the further exclusion of Neil Young. That would be insult on top of injury.
<strong>Vit Wagner is a writer living in Toronto.</strong>

Obama’s bluff is ignored, but only until Harper realizes that the new Comprehensive Economic Trade Agreement with the European Union hasn’t yet been ratified. Cheney is released to the Secret Service, and escapes to his ranch in Kenedy County, Texas. Amnesty International then makes a statement condemning the Canadian government for its failure to uphold its obligations under the UN Convention Against Torture. Protesters calling for Cheney’s arrest chock the incident up to a loss, and try again the next time Bush is in town.

Now, the actual series of events might have been slightly different had Cheney really be arrested Thursday afternoon, but probably not significantly so. Which is why appeals for detention from Lawyers Against the War (and groups like them) come off as so bizarre — why Canada would test its relationship with the United States, of all places, to put one former vice president behind bars? The gripe with Cheney is fair, but the call for police action is foolish. That is, at least until CETA becomes fully ratified.

Fresh from revelations he feared a terrorist Wi-Fi hack of his cardiac pacemaker, former U.S. vice-president Dick Cheney spoke Thursday in Toronto, where he accused President Barack Obama of a “war on coal,” of not knowing the meaning of the word “negotiation,” and of causing American allies to lose trust while adversaries lose fear.

“Nobody believes him out there in terms of our willingness to stand up for our friends and allies,” he said.

On Syria, for example, where U.S. threats of war fell flat, despite obvious use of chemical weapons, Mr. Cheney went so far as to say Russian President Vladimir Putin is setting U.S. policy, while Mr. Obama is “unwilling to face up to this risk or to do anything about it.”

By offering a selection of Saddam-era war stories, free advice, unfinished business, and political cheap shots from the comfort of retirement, the dark lord of George W. Bush’s White House did not disappoint on a Halloween afternoon, with hundreds of business leaders gathered for the Toronto Global Forum.

The luncheon began with the entry of Canadian dignitaries — Ed Fast, the international trade minister, who spoke on the new European trade deal, and Liberal cabinet veterans Pierre Pettigrew and Bill Graham.

Then, there was a brief pause, then some security guys in suits and among them, walking quickly, a white-haired man, unmistakeable in his hunched shortness. An imperial air followed him to the head table.

Some politicians light up a room with their entrance. Mr. Cheney made it go dark.

“I’m going to put back on my Darth Vader mask,” he said later, switching topics from energy policy to the resurgence of Al-Qaeda as a terrorist threat to the U.S., specifically along the Iraq-Syria border, where there has been a “reassertion and re-energizing, if you will, of Al-Qaeda and fellow travellers.”

“The problem has grown,” said the man who was second-in-command on the darkest day in modern American history.

He spoke of a new terrain of terror stretching from Mali and Niger in the sub-Saharan west, through the Maghreb and the Horn of Africa, into Yemen and the rest of Arabia, all the way east to Pakistan.

Beyond that are the whirling centrifuges of North Korea, enriching nuclear fuel as the world waits and the U.S. is increasingly disengaged, Mr. Cheney said. He lamented the only American soldiers in Iraq today are posted to the Baghdad embassy.

“Our plan was to leave a stay-behind force [in Iraq],” he said

The former Veep has similar complaints about the drawdown in Afghanistan, which he described as an important regional military base for U.S. forces, especially for drone attacks, and he recalled the mayhem that followed previous American retreats there, such as the war with the Soviets.

“What do we think is going to happen if we turn our backs on Afghanistan again? That’s exactly what’s happening,” he said.

What do we think is going to happen if we turn our backs on Afghanistan again? That’s exactly what’s happening,

Outside, a small crowd of rain-soaked protesters shouted vainly at a few bike cops to “do your duty, officers” and arrest the luncheon speaker.

But inside, over a meal of salad and pot pie, all was cool, corporate and conservative, with applause for Mr. Cheney’s support of the Keystone XL pipeline, and a deferential interview conducted by RBC Capital Markets vice-chairman Michael Fortier, the former senator appointed by Prime Minister Stephen Harper in 2006 so he could serve in cabinet, and who resigned to run in the 2008 election, but lost.

Mr. Cheney said he once told a Calgary dinner Keystone XL was a sure thing, though it is now stalled, and he has not been back to Calgary since.

“There’s no reason in the world we shouldn’t build that pipeline,” he said to applause.

Though he was firm in his advocacy of North American energy independence, he called the Athabasca resources the “tar sands,” not the “oil sands,” as supporters usually prefer.

He was also chippy with his interviewer.

After an exchange on the Tea Party, in which Mr. Cheney stuck by his compatriots on the right wing of the Republican Party (he thinks the conflict is healthy as long as it remains internal), he parried what sounded like a suggestion from Mr. Fortier that the Republicans should moderate their message and campaign more like Rudy Giuliani, for example.

“I’m intrigued, always, by the advice we get,” he said, gesturing to Mr. Fortier as if he were CNN’s Anderson Cooper.

“It’s not advice,” said Mr. Fortier, who shifted tack into a question about leaker Edward Snowden and, in particular, whether the U.S. spies on Canada, its ally in the “five eyes,” the colloquial term for the AUSCANNZUKUS allegiance of powers, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the U.K. and the U.S.

“That’s a good question, and I’m not going to answer it,” said Mr. Cheney, adding he has been out of office for five years.

“If there were some kind of program, it would be classified and I wouldn’t be able to talk about it.”

Mr. Fortier described this friendly spying as a line Canada thought the U.S. would not cross.

“That’s not a question,” said Mr. Cheney.

National Post

]]>http://news.nationalpost.com//im-going-to-put-back-on-my-darth-vader-mask-dick-cheney-jokes-during-toronto-speech/feed/0stdDick Cheney speaks to the speaking at the International Economic Forum of the Americas in Toronto.Dick Cheney feared terrorists would target his defibrillator, had doctors disable wireless, new interview revealshttp://news.nationalpost.com//dick-cheney-feared-terrorists-would-target-his-defibrillator-had-doctors-disable-wireless-new-interview-reveals
http://news.nationalpost.com//dick-cheney-feared-terrorists-would-target-his-defibrillator-had-doctors-disable-wireless-new-interview-reveals#commentsMon, 21 Oct 2013 14:00:53 +0000http://news.nationalpost.com/?p=379139

WASHINGTON — Former Vice-President Dick Cheney says he once feared that terrorists could use the electrical device that had been implanted near his heart to kill him and had his doctor disable its wireless function.

Cheney has a history of heart trouble, suffering the first of five heart attacks at age 37. He underwent a heart transplant last year at age 71.

In an interview with CBS’ 60 Minutes, Cheney says doctors replaced an implanted defibrillator near his heart in 2007. The device can detect irregular heartbeats and control them with electrical jolts.

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Cheney says that he and his doctor, cardiologist Jonathan Reiner, turned off the device’s wireless function in case a terrorist tried to send his heart a fatal shock.

HandoutCheney and Reiner are promoting a book they co-authored, Heart: An American Medical Odyssey

Years later, Cheney watched an episode of the Showtime series Homeland in which such a scenario was part of the plot.

“I was aware of the danger, if you will, that existed, but I found it credible,” Cheney tells 60 Minutes in a segment aired Sunday. “Because I know from the experience we had and the necessity for adjusting my own device that it was an accurate portrayal of what was possible.”

Cheney and Reiner are promoting a book they co-authored, Heart: An American Medical Odyssey.

In the 60 Minutes interview, Reiner says he worried that Cheney couldn’t stand the pressure that came on Sept. 11, 2001, the day terrorists attacked the U.S. Medical tests seen that morning showed Cheney had elevated levels of potassium in his blood, a condition called hyperkalemia, which could lead to abnormal heart rhythms and cardiac arrest.

Reiner says he watched news coverage of the day’s events on television and thought, “Oh, great, the vice-president is going to die tonight from hyperkalemia.”

Cheney underwent numerous heart-related procedures over the years, including angioplasties, catheterizations and a quadruple bypass operation. However, he says the health problems never affected his job performance during his eight years as vice-president in George W. Bush’s administration.

Kent Smith / ShowtimeYears later, Cheney watched an episode of the Showtime series Homeland in which such a scenario was part of the plot

Asked on 60 Minutes if worried about his physical health impacting his judgment and cognition, Cheney replies, “No.” He says he was aware of potential side effects from limited blood flow to the brain and effects on cognition and judgment but didn’t worry about it.

“You know, I was as good as I could be, you know,” Cheney says, “given the fact I was 60-some years old at that point and a heart patient.”

Cheney also dismisses stress as having had an impact on his heart disease. “I simply don’t buy the notion that it contributed to my heart disease,” he says. “I always did what I needed to do in order to deal with the health crisis in the moment.”

]]>http://news.nationalpost.com//dick-cheney-feared-terrorists-would-target-his-defibrillator-had-doctors-disable-wireless-new-interview-reveals/feed/0stdFormer Vice-President Dick Cheney says he once feared that terrorists could use the electrical device that had been implanted near his heart to kill him and had his doctor disable its wireless functionHandoutKent Smith / ShowtimeLiz Cheney, daughter of Dick Cheney, takes on Barack Obama, 'big government' in Wyoming Senate bidhttp://news.nationalpost.com//liz-cheney-daughter-of-dick-cheney-takes-on-barack-obama-big-government-in-wyoming-senate-bid
http://news.nationalpost.com//liz-cheney-daughter-of-dick-cheney-takes-on-barack-obama-big-government-in-wyoming-senate-bid#commentsMon, 26 Aug 2013 15:08:02 +0000http://news.nationalpost.com/?p=355836

Far out in the American West, under the big skies and rough-hewn landscapes of Wyoming, near the town that William “Buffalo Bill” Cody gave his name, a race is on for the soul of America.

And it is a woman with a familiar surname who is asking for a chance to lead a renewed assault on Washington and rid America of what she sees as the scourge of Barack Obama, impending socialism and the grasping hand of big government.

Liz Cheney, the 46-year-old daughter of former U.S. vice-president Dick Cheney, doesn’t stand much over five feet tall in her cowboy boots, but from behind her sunglasses she radiates a toughness that suits a place where you can still legally take a six-shooter into a bar.

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It is early days in her race for the 2014 Senate, but as Ms. Cheney addresses a meeting of the Big Horn Basin branch of the Tea Party, she is breathing conservative fire and warning that America is facing “a moment of decision.”

“We will not be able to save this great nation unless everyone of us dedicates ourselves to standing up and pushing back,” she announces to cheers.

Ms. Cheney, who is married but retains her maiden name, has a keen ear for her rural audience and their grievances — ObamaCare, taxation and regulation — all of which she checks off one by one, to wild applause.

Who cares if they say you are an obstructionist? You say, ’That’s right’, I’m obstructing because I’m a patriot

“Who cares if they say you are an obstructionist? You say, ’That’s right’, I’m obstructing because I’m a patriot’.”

“This president came into office, I believe, intending to weaken the nation,” she says, tapping into the nastier side of the Right’s caricature of Mr. Obama as a Muslim and a traitor. “You only have to turn on your TV set and see what is happening in places like Egypt and Syria to know that is the result when America is weak,” she said.

“America’s strength and America’s fighting men and women are the best guarantors of peace and security that the world has ever known.”

Most gathered at Big Horn Basin are over 60, and believe the America that they grew up in — self-reliant, enterprising and “free” — is being suffocated by a blanket of petty regulation and political correctness that intrudes everywhere from farmyard to workplace and beyond. “See that road,” says Larry French, a 63-year-old farmer and insurance agent, pointing to a pick-up throwing up a plume of dust. “The EPA [the federal environmental regulator] wants to ban that dust. Can you believe that? Every day, it’s just more regulations.”

Marc Piscotty/Getty Images Cheney, the daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney, will run against longtime incumbent Sen. Mike Enzi

It’s not clear if the EPA really does want to “ban the dust”.

Although born into politics, Ms. Cheney has never run for elected office.

She has quickly discovered the rougher side of the fight, being labelled a “carpetbagger” by opponents who say she moved back to Wyoming three years ago with her husband, a Washington lawyer, and five children only to lay the groundwork for her political ambitions.

Ms. Cheney describes herself as a “fourth-generation Wyomingite” but glosses over her own career as an international development lawyer for the World Bank. While the polls suggest she faces a tough fight — incumbents have a long track record of winning in Wyoming — Ms. Cheney still has plenty going for her in a state 12 times bigger than Wales, but with a population of just 575,000.

She has name recognition, both from her family and her work on Fox News television; she has her father’s formidable fundraising network; and she an opponent — Senator Mike Enzi — who has 18 unremarkable years in office and is seen as ripe for the plucking.

There can be no doubting her conservative lineage and Tea Party bona fides which have some on the Right of Republican party already speculating about her as a possible vice-presidential candidate — “a Sarah Palin with brains” as one put it. But that is all, possibly, in the future.

For now, Ms. Cheney says she has eyes only for Wyoming — and for storming Washington.

Last week’s terrorist attack in Boston was an emotional play in four acts. First came grief, then anger, then the morbid excitement of a manhunt. The last act was jubilation: When police officers zeroed in on Dzokhar Tsarnaev and took him into custody, they were applauded by a huge cheering Watertown crowd that had gathered to watch. It was essentially an anti-terrorism street party, with the police being celebrated as heroes.

Americans are famously skeptical of the police state: Many Second Amendment advocates even cite the possibility of righteous rebellion as an argument in support of maintaining private paramilitary weapon inventories. But it turns out that all it takes to make this libertarian spirit melt away is a pair of murderous idiots with some pressure cookers.

It seems a long time ago, but just last month, Republican Senator Rand Paul staged a 13-hour filibuster over the issue of U.S. government usage of weaponized drone aircraft over American soil. Even many lefitsts — who typically lampoon Paul as a libertarian extremist — admitted that he was taking a principled stand on an important issue. Yet on Monday afternoon, the U.S. military could have flown a fleet of drones over Boston, and the city’s fearful residents would have stood and saluted. Following Monday’s news of a major cross-border terrorist plot being broken up, I suspect that many Canadians feel the same way about their own communities.

This is the effect of terrorism, or indeed of any form of deadly, random-seeming violence: In the immediate aftermath, people demand that leaders use any means possible to protect the citizenry.

Usually, those leaders are only too happy to oblige. George W. Bush and Dick Cheney certainly were: Last Tuesday, the day after the bombings, a bipartisan, blue-chip legal-advocacy group called the Constitution Project went public with its determination that the United States engaged “in the practice of torture” during the years following 9/11. Alas, no one paid much attention to the document, in part because of Boston, and in part because — to America’s shame — the torture issue has become almost banal over the last 12 years.

The impulse that seizes politicians in the wake of terrorist attacks would be comically ironic if it were not so frightening. For historical context, consider that the Boston Marathon is run every year on Patriots Day, which honours the men who shaped America’s tradition of freedom and due process. These include lawyer John Adams, who offered representation to such unpopular specimens as the eight British soldiers who shot into a crowd of protesters at the Boston Massacre of March 5, 1770. (The defendants claimed self-defence. Six were acquitted.) Yet now, following another Boston massacre 243 years later, Republican Senator Lindsey Graham has declared: “I hope [the] administration will at least consider holding the Boston suspect as enemy combatant for intelligence gathering purposes” — and “the last thing we may want to do is read Boston suspect Miranda Rights telling him to ‘remain silent.’”

Britons once fretted over the proliferation of CCTV cameras in their country — but then came the 2005 transit bombings, and the complaints ebbed

The whole episode presents a case study in why the campaign to protect our civil liberties from the surveillance state seems doomed. In times of peace, civil libertarians who oppose ubiquitous closed-circuit TV cameras, Internet snooping and other privacy infringements are lucky to fight for a draw. But even that rearguard battle is lost as soon as bombs start exploding. Britons once fretted over the proliferation of CCTV cameras in their country — but then came the 2005 transit bombings, and the complaints ebbed. In the United States, the same will be true in the aftermath of Boston, where CCTV footage played an important role in identifying the Marathon-bombing suspects.

I’m as happy as everyone else that the Tsarnaev brothers were found, and that Canadian police apparently have broken up what might have been an even more deadly plot in our own country. Nothing a civil libertarian can say will take anyting away from their excellent police work. But as with all terrorist attacks, the emotional power of these crimes is hampering the ability of otherwise reasonable people to settle on the correct balance between security and civil liberties in a free society.

jkay@nationalpost.comjonkay
— Jonathan Kay is Managing Editor for Comment at the National Post, and a Fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies in Washington, D.C.

Dick Cheney thought it was a good idea to invade Iraq, so the fact he reckons the U.S. is in “deep doo-doo” over North Korea should perhaps be treated with degree of caution. Even his ideological soulmate Paul Wolfowitz recently conceded to the Times of London that Iraq was a series of blunders that spiralled out of control. Cheney may be the last true believer.

Nonetheless, he has put his former vice-presidential finger on a problem that is perplexing much of official Washington, not to mention Japan, China, various Pacific islands and the west coast of the U.S.: just how seriously should anyone treat Kim Jong-un, the pipsqueak dictator who has been threatening in ever-more hysterical terms to annihilate the U.S., and day now.

The conundrum was succinctly reflected on Tuesday by Adm. Samuel Locklear, commander of U.S. forces in the Pacific, who told U.S. senators that Mr. Kim — the third Kim to run North Korea — used the past year to develop his personal power structure after taking over from his father, Kim #2. He also said the U.S. would have no trouble dealing with whatever missiles Kim managed to get into the air.

According to Reuters, Locklear said the Pentagon believes North Korea has moved an unspecified number of Musudan missiles to its east coast, with a range of roughly 3,000-3,500 kilometres. That would put it in range of Guam, a U.S. territory, but not Hawaii or the U.S. mainland. The White House says its “working assumption” is that Kim has two missiles that may be prepared to launch. Locklear said the navy could shoot them down if that happens, but might not bother unless they’re heading towards U.S. territory or an ally. And given the iffy record of past North Korean test launches, the likelihood of them hitting their target is significantly less than certain.

So the problem isn’t really the potential for a nuclear holocaust in the U.S. or Japan. The problem is how to deal with a little twerp like Kim who has inherited his father’s ability to cause far more trouble on the international front than his impoverished, backward nation deserves. Washington would be fully justified in ignoring him, allowing him to bellow threats into the wind until he wears himself out. But that might prompt him to do something even more stupid, like actually launching a missile or two, possibly including one at neighbouring South Korea. Starting an actual war would likely guarantee the eradication of the Kim regime, and possibly the North Korean nation, as the forces arrayed against him are overwhelmingly superior. But having pushed the game this far, he may not be able to back down without endangering his stature, and survival, within the paranoid North Korean power structure.

It seems that there is not much that U.S. leaders can do now but wait for Kim Jong Un to make the next move. But that’s a high-stakes game, since he seems to be running out of moves that don’t involve a missile launch. As experts on the region have been saying all week, perhaps the most worrisome aspect of this crisis is that the North Korean leader doesn’t appear to have left himself an exit door.

If, after all this huffing and puffing and rattling of missiles, Kim Jong Un simply backs down and goes back to fiddling with his Play Station and making vacation plans with Dennis Rodman, could his own military see that as a sign of weakness and stage a coup? And so, the 30-year-old despot may feel as if he has no choice but to finish the game.

There is a fairly straighforward solution to the situation. China could simply cut off the food and fuel that flows into North Korea, or open the border to let North Koreans flee their despotic rulers. There are signs Beijing has had enough of the Kims: the new president, President Xi Jinping, told a gathering of political and business leaders last week that no country “should be allowed to throw a region and even the whole world into chaos for selfish gain.” No names were mentioned, but guess who he was talking about.

Barring action from China, the President of the world’s most powerful military, and the commanders of its various divisions, are left waiting to see what a pint-sized despot on the other side of the ocean will do about the crisis he’s created out of thin air. It’s not altogether unlike the Iraq situation, when Washington was left guessing whether Saddam Hussein really had weapons of mass destruction, and might use them. A Cheney reaction might be to invade. Then the doo-doo would really hit the fan.

DALLAS — Former first lady Laura Bush wants to be removed from a pro-gay marriage group’s national advertising campaign featuring prominent people speaking on the topic.

The Respect for Marriage Coalition responded that it would start a new ad this weekend. The group, made up of more than 80 organizations supporting the freedom of gays to marry, said Thursday that it appreciated Bush’s previous comments but was “sorry she didn’t want to be included in an ad.”

The national advertising campaign of print, television and online ads that launched this week featured a quote from an appearance by Bush on CNN in which she says: “When couples are committed to each other and love each other then they ought to have the same sort of rights that everyone has.”

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The ads also include clips of President Barack Obama, former Vice-President Dick Cheney and former Secretary of Defence Colin Powell talking about same-sex marriage. The coalition noted that it had used for the campaign public comments from “American leaders who have expressed support for civil marriage.”

Bush spokeswoman Anne MacDonald has said that Bush asked to be removed from the campaign after learning that she was being featured. MacDonald has said Bush “did not approve of her inclusion in this advertisement nor is she associated in any way with the group that made the ad.”

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9LiLNVYjOAI&w=620&h=349]

After the coalition released its statement Thursday, MacDonald said Bush would have no further comment.

Cheney, whose daughter Mary is gay, said in a speech at the National Press Club in 2009 that he supported gays being able to marry but believed that states, not the federal government, should make the decision. The ad campaign that included Bush also featured a clip of Cheney saying at the National Press Club “Freedom means freedom for everyone.”

Powell was shown in a clip from CNN saying, “Allowing them to live together with the protection of the law, it seems to me is the way we should be moving in this country.” Obama’s quote came from his inaugural address this year during which he says, “Our journey is not complete until our gay brothers and sisters are treated like anyone else under the law.”

]]>http://news.nationalpost.com//laura-bush-asks-to-be-removed-from-pro-gay-marriage-coalitions-ad-campaign/feed/0std"When couples are committed to each other and love each other then they ought to have the same sort of rights that everyone has," Laura Bush said in a CNN clip used by the group.John Moore: Mike Huckabee promotes chicken with a side order of bigotryhttp://news.nationalpost.com/full-comment/john-moore-mike-huckabee-promotes-chicken-with-a-side-order-of-bigotry
http://news.nationalpost.com/full-comment/john-moore-mike-huckabee-promotes-chicken-with-a-side-order-of-bigotry#commentsTue, 31 Jul 2012 13:21:58 +0000http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/?p=86419

This Wednesday, at the urging of former U.S. presidential wannabe/Fox News gabber Mike Huckabee, people who don’t like homosexuals will gorge themselves on chicken at a previously mostly unheard of fast food chain. They will photograph and Tweet themselves – as former wannabe vice president Sarah Palin did this past weekend – gleefully celebrating their intolerance.

No doubt Palin was taking a break from looking after her illegitimate grandson while his teenage mother continues her relentless pursuit of a career in reality television. That’s the American right wing’s version of family values.

Dan Cathy, president and owner of Chick fil-A doesn’t support gay marriage. He has dedicated millions of dollars to political action groups to prevent same-sex marriage from spreading to jurisdictions beyond the six states where it is already legal.

It’s worth noting that Cathy isn’t spending his money offering counselling to straight couples in trouble. He isn’t fighting spousal abuse or underwriting campaigns to reduce the incidence of single motherhood. His millions are pledged to a deliberate effort to deny basic legal rights to dedicated and loving couples and their children. That makes him a promoter of intolerance and an enabler of hatred.

Of course Cathy is free to do with his money what he will. But he cannot assume that his right to free speech comes without consequences. Cathy can champion the disenfranchisement of gays and the Dixie Chicks can deplore George W. Bush, but if those positions draw ire and boycott, tough luck.

Those who make a pilgrimage to Chick fil-A outlets in the U.S. on Wednesday share common ground with the men and women who heckled the Little Rock Nine or those who poured sugar over the heads of whites and blacks who dared sit together at a Woolworths counter. Twenty years from now will they flush with the shame that most surviving segregationists now feel when they reflect on their actions and thoughts in the 1950s and 60s?

Every rights movement goes through the final spasms of a rearguard action of those foolish enough to think they still wear the breastplate of righteousness. As they are sucked into the undertow of changing public opinion they squeal about freedom of expression and conscience. What they so bitterly resent is that as the tide of mainstream opinion pulls away from them they find themselves stranded with opinions completely lacking in any legitimate moral or intellectual justification.

Mixed in with those who believe they are still on the side of right are the hypocrites. For civil rights it was a Strom Thurmond who fought relentlessly against equality for blacks even as he fathered a daughter with a black woman. Today it’s the Dick Cheneys who battled publicly against equity for gays while offering unqualified fatherly love for his gay daughter, her partner and the grandchildren he loves.

As I write this Provincetown, Massachusetts is observing Family Week. I am surrounded by same sex couples doting on children who are blissfully unaware that there is anything out of the ordinary about their families. They go to the beach, ride their fathers’ and mothers’ shoulders and enjoy face painting on the apron of city hall while Dan Cathy squanders his money to trying to shame and marginalize their parents.

Cathy will enjoy a rush of money on Wednesday. He should bank it. Gays and Lesbians wont bring his chain down but over the years fewer and fewer Americans will want to associate themselves with a brand that stands for a negative perspective on life.

Times are changing. Who wants their chicken with a side order of hate?

Guess who’s coming to a Democratic convention near you: Yes, it’s the ever-popular Bill Clinton, who, like Ronald Reagan, only appears to grow in stature the longer he’s been out of the Oval Office.

Mr. Clinton will deliver a keynote speech and formally nominate Barack Obama for a second term in office.

Says the New York Times:

The prominent role of Mr. Clinton, which is scheduled to be announced on Monday, signals an effort by the Obama campaign to pull out all the stops to rally Democrats when they gather for their party’s national convention in Charlotte, N.C

More to the point, the Washington Post says the role accorded the former president “is an acknowledgment by President Obama and his inner political circle of two things. First, that there is no better economic messenger in the party than the former president. And second that Obama needs Clinton.”

Not to get too conspiratorial about this, but could it also be a marker on behalf of Mr. Clinton, so that, in the remote possibility Hillary Clinton overcomes her reluctance and decides to seek the presidency in 2016, the Obama wing of the party will be expected to support her big time?

Meanwhile, ABC reports that former Republican vice-president Dick Cheney will skip his party’s convention, and go fishing instead. Ditto the two Bush presidents, George W. and George H.W. Politico comments: “Unless former vice president Dan Quayle shows up in Tampa, there will be no former presidents or vice presidents at the event.”

Cheney also missed the 2008 convention.Read more: On Sunday he told an interviewer that John McCain’s selection of Sarah Palin as a running mate was a mistake.

“I like Governor Palin. I’ve met her. I know her. She’s an attractive candidate. But based on her background, she’d only been governor for, what, two years. I don’t think she passed that test … of being ready to take over,”

Full Comment’s Araminta Wordsworth brings you a daily round-up of quality punditry from across the globe. Today: Did he jump or was he pushed? Barack Obama’s expressed support of gay marriage bears all the signs of having been forced by Joe “Loose Lips” Biden.

On the weekend, the notoriously gaffe-prone VEEP told NBC’s Meet the Press he was all for gays being allowed to wed. It didn’t take long for the other shoe to drop. Wednesday the U.S. President himself came off the fence.

“At a certain, point I’ve just concluded that for me personally, it is important for me to go ahead and affirm that I think same-sex couples should be able to get married,” Obama said (not what I’d call a ringing endorsement).

While liberals in the U.S. and around the world are giddy with delight, putting this incredibly divisive issue front and centre in an already polarized campaign has huge risks for Obama. As Jim Geraghty at the Morning Jolt notes at least seven swing states have bans or near-bans on gay marriage.

When the issue has been put on the ballot, a gay-marriage ban usually passes by a wide margin: 55% in Colorado, 62% in Florida, 62% in Ohio, 57% in Virginia, 67% in Nevada, 59% in Wisconsin. Oh, and North Carolina, now, with 61%.
Agree with Obama or not, it is reasonable to contend that he took a risk in taking this stand now. Not as much of a risk as, say, right before North Carolina’s referendum instead of right after, but a risk.

In counterbalance, the President’s statement firmly differentiates him from his Republican challenger Mitt Romney, who remains dead set against the idea, opposing even civil unions.

That’s the jumping-off point for Molly Ball at The Atlantic, who points out while the President has taken a stand that could hurt him electorally, his opponent’s views on the issue are also out of step with voters — half of all Americans support gay marriage.

Though the population as a whole is trending toward favoring legal gay marriage, those who actually vote are a different story, and voters in swing states are still less favourably disposed toward the issue … At the same time, though, support for civil unions tends to run higher than support for gay marriage, as solid majorities think gay couples should be afforded some sort of legal recognition …
Mitt Romney, has thus also taken a politically inexpedient position: He opposes not just gay marriage but civil unions as well … In this, Romney’s stance is to the right of even many Republicans, as the Obama campaign pointed out in a video that features George W. Bush voicing support for civil unions. But the legislative tussle in Colorado [where Republicans used procedural tactics to block a civil-unions bill] shows that hard-core opponents are just as determined to keep civil unions from becoming legal as they are to block gay marriage, even though they’re on much shakier public ground.

Romney though is to the right of many his fellow Republicans. Even crusty old dinosaurs like Dick Cheney and Rick Perry have supported states trying to legalize gay marriage if they wish. At The Associated Press, Charles Babbington believes

Public opinion about gay marriage has changed so rapidly that President Barack Obama’s historic embrace of it may pose as many political risks to Republicans as to the president and his fellow Democrats.
The president’s dramatic shift on the issue — a watershed moment in U.S. politics, even if many people felt it was inevitable — is the latest sign that Democratic hopes increasingly rest on younger, college-educated and largely urban voters, whose lifestyles are shaped by social mobility more than religious and community traditions. Many young adults find the notion of discriminating against gays and lesbians as incomprehensible as their parents’ and grandparents’ accounts of living through racial segregation.

Chris Stirewalt at Fox News has more practical explanation for Obama’s sea-change: money.

[Thursday], Obama is headed to California for a huge fundraiser with movie heartthrob George Clooney. The event will include many Hollywood luminaries and will itself raise millions for the president’s re-election bid. In addition, Obama has been raising money off the dinner with a contest in which supporters can register to win a trip to Clooney’s event by making small donations and providing their personal information to the campaign.
Same-sex marriage is a huge issue in the entertainment industry, which employs many proponents of the practice. California voters passed a ban on same-sex marriage in 2009, prompting outrage in the film industry.

On Sept. 17, 2001, six days after the terrorist attacks in Washington, D.C., president George W. Bush sent a 12-page Memorandum of Notification to his National Security Council. That memorandum, we know now, authorized the Central Intelligence Agency to set up and run secret prisons. We still don’t know exactly what it says: CIA attorneys have told a judge the document is so off-limits to the courts and the American people that even the font is classified. But we do know what it did: It literally opened a space for torture.

Thanks to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit — a lawsuit The New York Times has called “among the most successful in the history of public disclosure” — we now know much of what happened in those secret spaces the Bush administration created. Under that litigation, the American Civil Liberties Union gathered nearly 140,000 formerly classified documents from the Department of Defense, the Justice Department and the CIA that detail the abuse of prisoners in U.S. custody in the “War on Terror.” My job, as the author of the website Thetorturereport.org and then of the book The Torture Report: What the Documents Say About America’s Post-9/11 Torture Program, was to dig through that incredible trove of documents and figure out for myself what, exactly, my country had done.

Here is what I learned.

The highest U.S. government officials, up to and including president Bush, broke international and U.S. laws banning torture and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment. Worse, they made their subordinates in the military and civilian intelligence services break those laws for them.

When the men and women they asked to break those laws protested, knowing they could be prosecuted for torture, they pretended to rewrite the law. They commissioned legal opinions they said would shield those who carried out the abuses from being hauled into court, as the torture ban requires. “The law has been changed,” detainees around the world were told. “No rules apply.”

Then they tortured. They tortured men at military bases and detention centres in Afghanistan and Iraq, in Guantanamo, and in U.S. Navy bases on American soil; they tortured men in secret CIA prisons set up across the globe specifically to terrorize and torture prisoners; they sent many more to countries with notoriously abusive regimes and asked them to do the torturing. At least twice, after the torturers themselves concluded there was no point to further abuse, Washington ordered that the prisoners be tortured some more.

They tortured innocent people. They tortured people who may have been guilty of terrorism-related crimes, but they ruined any chance of prosecuting them because of the torture. They tortured people when the torture had nothing to do with imminent threats: They tortured based on bad information they had extracted from others through torture; they tortured to hide their mistakes and to get confessions; they tortured sometimes just to break people, pure and simple.

And they conspired to cover up their crimes. They did this from the start, by creating secret facilities and secrecy regimes to keep what they were doing from the American people and the world. They did it by suppressing and then destroying evidence, including videotapes of the torture. They did it by denying detainees legal process because, as the CIA’s Inspector General put it in a 2004 report, when you torture someone you create an “Endgame” problem: You end up with detainees who, “if not kept in isolation, would likely divulge information about the circumstances of their detention.”

They managed all this, for a time, through secrecy — a secrecy that depended on the aggressive suppression of two groups of voices.

Over and over again, in Afghanistan and Iraq, in Guantanamo, in secret CIA black sites and at CIA headquarters, in the Pentagon, and in Washington, men and women recognized the torture for what it was and refused to remain silent. They objected, protested and fought to prevent, and then to end, these illegal and immoral interrogations. While the president and his top advisers approved and encouraged the torture of prisoners, there was dissent in every agency, at every level.

The documents are full of these voices. In fact, it is thanks to these dissenters that much of the documentary record exists. From emails among FBI agents sharing their shock over scenes they had witnessed in interrogation booths in Guantanamo, to letters and memoranda for the record, to major internal investigations, the documents show that those who ordered and carried out the torture did so despite constant warnings and objections that their actions were ineffective, short-sighted and wrong. It is no wonder that so many of these documents were suppressed.

Alongside the dissenters, another group of voices surfaces in these once-classified materials: the men we tortured. Theirs are the voices the entire system of incommunicado detention and closed tribunals was constructed to censor, and it worked: To this day, few Americans can identify more than a handful of detainees by name. Fewer still know how far from the “worst of the worst” the vast majority of those we tortured turned out to be.

Torture dehumanizes. But that only extends a process of dehumanization that must take place in order for abuse to happen: It is impossible to torture those whose humanity we recognize. In joke-filled letters to their attorneys, in frank and vivid testimony in tribunal transcripts, in startlingly naive and in powerfully emotional exchanges with interrogators, images emerge not of the maniacal and monolithic and monstrous, but of distinct and recognizable individuals. To hear these voices is to begin to reverse the terrible dehumanization the documents chronicle.

Last month, I was once again in a federal courtroom in New York, watching one of the last chapters in the remarkable Freedom of Information Act saga that has unearthed those 140,000 torture documents. The argument that day centred on whether the CIA would finally be required to release a single photograph of Abu Zubaydah, who was captured 10 years ago last month and who became the first subject of the Bush administration’s experiments with “Enhanced Interrogation Techniques.”

The CIA has gone to extreme lengths to conceal images of Abu Zubaydah and his treatment first in a secret CIA dungeon in Thailand and later in another CIA black site in Poland — lengths that include destroying 92 videotapes of his interrogation and torture. It has paid no price for destroying those tapes, or for holding Abu Zubaydah for more than four years in its network of secret prisons, or for his well-documented White House-orchestrated torture, which included 83 episodes of waterboarding, the last one overseen by a Washington official who flew to the black site because the administration refused to believe his interrogator’s conclusion that he was not withholding information.

The court has not yet ruled on the question of the photograph. But there is little reason to believe the CIA will now be required to turn over a picture that very well may offer graphic evidence of abuse — and at the very least would drive home the simple fact that the target of so much calculated and extreme mistreatment was a single, and at the time utterly defenceless, human being.

But we should hardly need that photograph. We already have Abu Zubaydah’s own descriptions of his ordeal, in his statement to the International Committee to the Red Cross and in his testimony (still heavily redacted) to the Guantanamo tribunals. Those descriptions match exactly the treatment the CIA proposes and Bush’s lawyers approved in the infamous Aug. 1, 2002 torture memos. We don’t have the videotapes, but we do have the list of cables that flowed back and forth between the Thai black site and Washington reporting on the progress of Abu Zubaydah’s interrogation. And we have the CIA Inspector General’s appalled reaction after he flew to Thailand to view those tapes.

It is one thing to be in the dark; it is another thing to have the record of what happened in the darkness right in front of us, and fail to reckon with it. That, sadly, is the situation in the United States today.

In March, the Polish newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza reported that prosecutors in Poland have charged the country’s former top intelligence official with depriving Abu Zubaydah and others of their freedom and allowing corporal punishment in the secret prison the CIA set up and ran near the village of Szymany.

The CIA shipped Abu Zubaydah from Thailand to Poland on Dec. 4, 2002. When he arrived in Szymany — hooded, diapered, shackled — and stepped onto the tarmac with his armed, CIA-contracted escorts, he was setting foot in a country with one of the newest constitutions in the world, a nation that in the moving words of that document’s preamble, remains “mindful of the bitter experiences of the times when fundamental freedoms and human rights were violated in our Homeland.” Ratified in 1997 — barely five years before the CIA’s plane landed — Poland’s constitution declares simply, “No one may be subjected to torture or cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment. The application of corporal punishment shall be prohibited.”

That the United States operated secret prisons anywhere on Earth just so we could place our prisoners and jailors outside the reach of U.S. laws prohibiting torture is outrageous, of course. But there’s something especially perverse about basing one of these facilities in a country whose “bitter recent experiences” include first Nazi occupation and extermination camps and then four decades of communist oppression. Out of those experiences, the people of Poland created a state that embraces, without reservation, the absolute ban on torture and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment, and the first thing the United States does is degrade that state by setting up and running a secret torture chamber on Polish soil.

How would Americans feel if we learned our government had secretly allowed a foreign government to violate some of our most basic laws and fundamental principles on American soil? Shouldn’t we be just as outraged to know our government conspired to violate those laws and principles abroad? That it did so in secret no longer absolves us: Plenty of the record is public now; now we know. And with Poland’s former spy chief under indictment for facilitating the CIA’s torture, and with similar investigations under way in several other countries, we, and the world, will soon know more.

Slate.com

]]>http://news.nationalpost.com/full-comment/larry-siems-americans-abused-prisoners-in-unconscionable-ways/feed/0stdFile photograph shows military police bringing a detainee to an interrogation room for questioning at the Naval Base at Guantanamo BayDick Cheney released from hospital after heart transplanthttp://news.nationalpost.com/news/dick-cheney-released-from-hospital-after-heart-transplant
http://news.nationalpost.com/news/dick-cheney-released-from-hospital-after-heart-transplant#commentsTue, 03 Apr 2012 19:51:15 +0000http://news.nationalpost.com/?p=158158

Former Vice President Dick Cheney, who underwent a heart transplant 10 days earlier, was released from the hospital on Tuesday, a spokeswoman said.

“As he leaves the hospital, the former vice president and his family want to again express their deep gratitude to the donor and the donor’s family for this remarkable gift,” his spokeswoman said in a statement.

Cheney, 71, who has a history of heart problems having suffered the first of five heart attacks at age 37, was released from Inova Fairfax Hospital Heart and Vascular Institute.

He received the heart from an anonymous donor after being on the waiting list for more than 20 months.

After leaving office following eight years as vice president under former President George W. Bush, Cheney remained a vocal defender of the administration’s policies in fighting terrorism.